…the United States Postal Service somehow managed to lose 3.5 billion dollars in its fiscal third quarter. For some reason, the USPS continues to think that cutting one more day of service a week would somehow make them relevant again.
Despite the Fact That Everyone Uses Netflix and Orders Stuff Online All the Time…
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They lost money because they have an army of people hand-delivering mostly meaningless junk to any address in the country for less than the cost of a candy bar.
Very little of what I order online is shipped via USPS, and Netflix gets an even better rate than the rest of us, who still pay a pittance for what is overall a ridiculously fast and reliable service.
You two need to get a room? Er, boxing ring? Er…
Paul,
I find this post very populist and other things that are the opposite of thoughtful. Common Sense is no replacement for, you know, reality.
Your headline implies the post office is very relevant. Your last sentence implies they are not. Which is it, and what’s your business plan?
They need to raise the price of postage for letters. It’s ridiculous to think that for $.50 they will take my letter anywhere in the country. UPS and Fedex are much more expensive for that, and USPS needs to be on par with them.
And you can guarantee that in 5 years Netflix isn’t even going to be delivering discs anymore, so say goodbye to that revenue too. They’ll be purely streaming and Redbox will have taken over the mantle of being the last point of physical media delivery and rental.
Government services shouldn’t be run like a corporation though, right?
They should quit giving massive discounts to junk mailers. You think all those coupon fliers are delivered at $0.44 per mailing?
What @1, @4, and @7 said. i can add no more.
Netflix has said itself it expects to ship discs until 2030.
I know! And Social Security doesn’t make a profit either! And hello, military-industrial complex? We had to spend $650 billion on it last year! And still in the red! So inefficient! So un-American!
@7, From my (limited) knowledge of the direct (junk) mail market, a lot of advertisers are already thinking that bulk mailing is too expensive. Being that a mailman/woman is touching every mailbox everyday anyway, they might make more money if they lower the price for bulk mailing to get more advertisers to do it.
Sadly, the mail system is quickly becoming obsolete. I’m not sure how I feel about that as it seems like cheaply, quickly, securely moving things around the country is a pretty important social service, but the free market is speaking.
@6, USPS is not a government agency.
@Mr John
Actually the free market isn’t really speaking. UPS and Fedex DO NOT deliver to some addresses. They actually use the USPS to make the final leg of the delivery. If the free market was actually speaking, there would be people who simply didn’t get mail at all.
The coupon mailers do things that saves the post office time and money, hence the discount. I pay an average of .17 per piece because all 150k pieces every week are sorted in walk sequence, have a high saturation by carrier route, get delivered to the individual post offices that the carriers deliver from, etc.
It’s not the same as shoving a letter in a blue box. If I did that, I’d have to pay full rate.
Do the rates need to be raised? Absolutely, and that would help but would come nowhere near solving the problem.
The real problem there is with the layers of management and employees that have absolutely no accountability. None. They have lifetime jobs with no possibility of ever getting fired and their union has negotiated for them an outstanding pay and benefits package. Example,the person that comes to verify our plantload each week was out for 3 months after getting bypass surgery. He came back for 3 weeks and then went on 5 weeks vacation. I promise that FedEx or UPS would make you use your vacation and sick time rather than just pay you as if you were doing your job.
Unless mailing a letter is going to cost $100 each, you could not raise rates enough to make up for the problem presented by the employees and their benefits packages.
I love the post office. And, um, isn’t its existence mandated by the Constitution? Why is it even expected to be profitable?
Hasn’t the 5-day-operation already gone into effect in some parts of the country? I was passing through albequerque last fall and they thought I was crazy for asking why the post office was shut on a Saturday.
Albequerque is weird in general, though. maybe it’s just a continuation of the usual weirdness.
@12 – Yes, it is. USPS might not be taking tax money directly but everything about it from the ownership, monopoly protections, credit line with the government, and requirements of service make it pretty clear that it is a government agency.
@12 – Yes it is, you idiot.
The U.S. Postal Service IS NOT A BUSINESS! It is a public service provided by the federal government, and as Anthony@1 says, provides ridiculously fast and reliable service that is not and can not be matched by any private entity. I don’t care if it operates in the red – that’s why I pay taxes after all.
@14, can you offer anything beyond a single anecdote to support your analysis?
Sure, in large urban centers where there are a plethora of choices re: how to get physical items out of your hands and into someone else’s, USPS service might not be the MOST efficient in a cost-benefit analysis, but there are LOTS of places around the U.S. where it may, in point of fact, be the ONLY reliable option for mail or parcel delivery. Sure, UPS & Fed-Ex will probably do home delivery to some Rural Route in Nebraska or wherever, but they’re NOT going to be able to do it at the same ridiculously low piece-rate as USPS, or maybe they’ll get around to doing it a couple of weeks after it goes out, because they need a certain number of pieces going into that area to make it worth their while, or they’ll just charge old Farmer Brown $14.95 to send that birthday card to Aunt Sally in Kansas City.
In short: in places where delivery choices abound the USPS may not seem as relevant, but for a lot of folks who DON’T have those choices, it’s still very much relevant.
@18
The USPS doesn’t directly receive any tax money. It was organized as an independent agency of the US Government in the early 1980’s and intended to be self sufficient. The only money it was supposed to take from the government was to deliver mail to overseas voters, and to help deliver mail to disabled people. However, it does borrow money from the US Treasury to cover it’s deficits. This money is supposed to be paid back.
@COMTE
Actually Fedex and UPS probably won’t deliver to that rural route in Nebraska. They will probably deliver to the nearest post office and then contract with them to do the actual delivery.
I fucking loathe UPS and FedEx. If you’re using them for anything other than business shipping, they are a major pain in the ass. Just today I found out that UPS sent a package back to sender because I didn’t specifically call them to ask them to hold it. This is after years of holding the package for seven days being standard procedure. And their customer service line that you have to deal with every time you need a package held is a piece of shit. As long as internet companies refuse to use USPS, I will refuse to give them my business.
Isn’t there some sort of Freakonomics-type analysis, but done by somebody good, about the cost/benefit/whatnot around USPS? In terms of what it does for the common welfare it’s sort of a utility as much as anything else, no?
A mailman I once met at a bar explained to me: “the mail system is broken. There’s less and less mail to deliver and more areas to deliver it to.” A quarter of Americans subscribing to Netflix doesn’t make up for almost every American getting at least one, and in some cases all, bills electronically. Sprawl makes it costly to deliver what’s left. Broken.
@20… indeed! see also the Rural Electrification Administration, which brought power where private industry was unwilling, which along with RFD greatly improved life in rural areas.
No private company would do the job of the USPS because of universal delivery. USPS can never be profitable because of that.
Seems like it could be yet another case of the tragedy of the commons. The profitable pieces of the delivery business have been taken over by private, for-profit companies, leaving the less profitable tasks to the public entity, which has a mandate to serve everybody. The for-profit businesses lean on that service mandate to cover holes in their coverage because hey, why not?
As to “relevance,” does a similar argument render libraries irrelevant?
Does USPS lose a shitload of money on mass mailings? Because if it does, I see a good way to save a bunch of trees and save USPS money a the same time.
Paul dear, for someone who professes to love books so much, i’m surprised by your tone. Among all of its other charms, USPS ships books at a ridiculously low rate.
I’ve read that a big part of the post office red ink has to to with some dreary accounting thing where they have to account for pension payments in a way most other agencies don’t. It was some GOP dirty trick, like the scam they came up with to make Amtrak “accountable”, without giving them any Capitol funds.
Wherever there’s a stink in government, there’s usually some Republican fink. Trouble is, most Americans are too naive to realize that.
@19 I gave an example. It was used to illustrate the rest of the point. I’m drawing on 3.5 years of dealing with the USPS from the local to the regional level. This year I will be paying them $1.25m.
Others make a valid point about delivery areas expanding and volume per person shrinking. I’d still argue the biggest problem is the lack of accountability and ridiculous compensation packages.
Another example, just for you 19. As I stated before, there is 0 accountability for the carriers and office staff. this is because complaints don’t get attached to the person, but rather the position. If you call in that your mail is getting dumped in the ditch, has jizz stains all over it, isn’t getting delivered or whatever, the complaint sticks to that route. First off, there are 3 or more people that could be working that route at any time. Second, carriers can “bid” on open routes. So they leave your route and all the complaints behind. Sure, there may be a reputation that gets around the post offices in a town, but nothing can be done about it.
I know it sounds unbelievable, but this came straight from the postmaster of one of the areas I deal with.
So really, in my view, you can collect all the postage revenue you want, won’t make a difference if you can’t hold anyone accountable for managing it.
Side note. There is also some kind of weird reverence and almost fear that the other employees show towards the postmaster. I just can’t explain it.
@31 I appreciate your effort here to argue your case in good faith, and I have no reason to doubt the examples you give. But what I’m really looking for isn’t examples, it’s data. The original post points to a 3.5 billion dollar loss in a single quarter, and unless I’ve misunderstood, you would lay that entirely at the feet of a unionized work force that is overpaid and underaccountable. Even if both things are true, it’s incredibly hard for me to believe that it’s the sole, or even most important, problem afflicting the USPS as an enterprise.
What I don’t know and would want to know before confidently laying the blame on magagement or the union is stuff like: what is the overall compensation budget, and how does it compare to other expenses? Has anyone done some kind of efficiency study to estimate how much is lost to the kind of management practices you criticize, or to the difficulty in removing poor performers from their jobs? What are the various sources of income to the USPS and how have they been changing over time? If you could fire everybody at the USPS and rehire a new workforce starting contract negotiations from scratch, how much could actually be saved? Etc.
The USPS needs to be run like a business cries the anti-government whackadoodles. Then they scream that they can’t cancel legally mandated Saturday delivery because, gee, none of the private carriers will deliver on Saturday so how can we do without it.
@32, that was lovely.
I have to send packages overseas, and the only place close to me is the local USPS. It’s already taking over 4 weeks. If a day is cut from service, it’s going to take LONGER? I can’t believe they can cut and day and remain at their current efficiency. If so, then why not just increase their efficiency because obviously they’re slacking if they can maintain quality while losing a work-day.